An embodiment of the present invention relates to the field of integrated circuits and, more particularly, to detecting on-die temperature and/or voltage variations.
In high-frequency integrated circuits, such as microprocessors, variations in voltage and/or temperature may result in frequency degradation. Currently, costly resources may be dedicated to, for example, managing voltage variations to avoid such degradation.
In some cases, to prevent functional failures, a voltage margin is added to a supply voltage such that, for maximum supply voltage droops, the operating frequency of the integrated circuit is still maintained. This approach, however, may result in significant power increases for much of the time the integrated circuit device is operating, even though the voltage droops that are being compensated for may occur only infrequently.
As integrated circuit device operating frequencies continue to increase, droop magnitude as a percentage of supply voltage also continues to increase. For some integrated circuits, it may not be possible to provide the necessary voltage margin to protect against voltage droop due to power and cost limitations, for example.